The Being of the Beautiful: Plato's Theatetus, Sophist, and Statesman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 115 The Being of the Beautiful: Plato's Theatetus, Sophist, and Statesman. Translated and with Commentary by Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. pp. li + 539. $4~-5o. This triad of scholarly, clear, and idiomatic new translations of the Theaetetus, Sophist and Politicus will be both useful and stimulating to classicists and students of philosophy . Naturally, some renderings of a few key words will be challenged, but these renderings follow consistently from Benardete's interpretation of the dialogues; the reader is, thus, not misled. Benardete's interpretations are called commentaries. Actually they have the more attractive form of continuous essays: lO6 pages on the Theaetetus, lo8 and 88 on the Sophist and Politicus respectively. The interpretations are brilliant, within Benardete's Straussian and platonizing approach. But we note that calling the third dialogue "Statesman" without initial explanation begs the question whether its alternative title is not truer to the ironic and exhibitive design of the work. If we call it "Statesman" and mean it literally, or even "neutrally" (xii), we are siding unstatedly with the doctrine of the sophist. But the latter has himself skimmed sophistically and evasively over the distinctions between the politician politikos, the party politician stasiastikos, and the (one, true, kingly) man of knowledge epistgmtn who cannot be found on earth. Here at 3o3c 1-5, Benardete translates go~tas (magicians ) as "enchanters" more happily than Fowler (who translates "cheats"). But he translates stasiastikos as "seditionary" which is more tendentious than Fowler's "partisan ." Similarly to Call the rhetorical sophist from Elea a "stranger" rather than the visitor (ksenos) which he is, in the fiction of the two dialogues, is to make an unnecessary (and potentially misleading) mystery of his identity. "The Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman," says Benardete, "are linked together both linguistically and thematically by the beautiful. An introduction to them therefore fulfills its task if it can indicate how the beautiful forms such a link and justifies an examination of Plato's examination of the beautiful in the Hippias Major" (xv). (That Plato has his Socrates and Hippias the Sophist search for a definition of the beautiful in just the way they do in the carefully constructed Hippias Major needs no validation, by the way, other than that which it gets as an artistically successful and dianoetically suggestive dialogue.) The notion of coming to Plato's triad by way of the Hippias is attractive, but the book as a whole does not argue explicitly or completely enough for Benardete's claim that the theme of the triad is that: "The beautiful is not a privileged being," or for Benardete's claim that the question, "How that conclusion can consist with the duality of the health and beauty of soul.., and the duality of the beautiful in the health of the soul.., can be said to be the theme of the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman." That the dialogues are so linked and have this for their theme, may have stimulated the author to write his book; but the reader has to take it as a generative assumption rather than an established conclusion. And, couldn't the Charmides, because it is concerned (among other things) with the knowledge of knowledge as well as with (Kritias's) sophistry, make an equally good introduction to the series? This is the triad in which the theory of ideas is (a) tested for its ability to supply a definition of knowledge, (~) used, in combination with the method of diairesis, to put on exhibit 116 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~4: ~ JANUARY ~986 the nature of Sophistic cleverness and (3) applied to politics in a Sophistic defense of the Pythagorean theory of "scientific" or non-constitutional monarchy. The difficulty with Benardete's choice of the Hippias Major, as an introduction to Plato's triad, is compounded by his assertion that at the same dme that "the dialogue vindicates Hippias' principles while holding him up to ridicule," he finds it to be "conspicuous" in its "incoherence," "absurd," "ugly," and "laughable" according to Hippias's principles themselves (xx). On page xv Benardete says, "One's first impression of any Platonic dialogue is that it is complete in itself, but...